Adventures in Software Development and Life

Author: Brent

Testing is a hard part of software development. One of the hardest aspects of development is testing code/features that you have created. It is easy to put the blinders up and write to the spec. Insider knowledge of the system probably plays a role in this difficulty. Seeing a system through user eyes is nearly impossible, but to get close you need to decouple yourself from the code.

I have been using Team Foundation Server for a few years now in my day job. Side jobs have also used TFS from time to time. Leveraging GIT and the pull requests to control code reviews has definitely improved my code and the code of my fellow developers.

Communication is hard. Developing software is hard. Communicating and developing software is harder.

Deploying ASP.NET web applications is a breeze with Jenkins and can really improve continuous integration/testing environment for UAT. It is also possible to do production deployments with scheduled builds. Continue reading →

I am not a 100% remote worker but all my remote software development consulting is 100% – remote. Communication is the key to having a good relationship with a client and having great results. If you can only send a message saying that you will look at something it is better than silence. Communicating with yourself about realistic deadlines will help yourself mange your schedule helping to prevent burn-out. Remote software development is a combination of the beauty and power of its discipline.

The beauty of remote work is the comfort of remote work: to be able to relax at home (or out-and-about) and get a few hours of work in is a great feeling. I also like to visit various coffee shops, public libraries, or other places of free WiFi. Being stuck in an office all the time can become a drag and hurt productivity. It has been in my experience that the developers typically draw the short straw for a nice office space or cube. Keeping a fresh and interesting environment will help keep a developer happy!

The power of remote work is simple; work when you want to. I can honestly say that a lot of my best ideas usually happen somewhere unexpected. I feel software development is a form of art and those ideas sometimes hit you when you are driving, taking a shower, sleeping, and not something that is entirely enforceable. There are times when you have to make quick decisions, but when you can take the time to think and analyze the situation – it will be a far better solution. There are deadlines to be maintained – there is a balance between those two forces. It is powerful and stressful to maintain your own work schedule and deadlines, but it is also liberating.

Where are we now?Where are we going?

I believe in the next 50 years or so the prominence of remote work will only grow. We will look back on this time and have a hard time grasping the concept… so… we drove everywhere and wasted time on commuting when you had the ability to work from home???

It is early in the remote work game… we’ve come a long way and we have a long way to go. It’s adoption has often been met with fear and reluctance unfortunately.

Database warehousing is a critical tool in the skill set of a developer. The ability to take normalized data and store it in a non-normalized dataset can increase loading times, reduce calculations and generate a large ROI. Large datasets will benefit dramatically from a warehouse of commonly/frequently accessed data facts.

ETL

Extract, Transform, Load ETL is the process to take normalized (usually) data into a faster data access view or tallied (summated) data view. In the Microsoft world there are a few ways to achieve this goal. T-SQL as a scheduled job can easy handle the simple data tasks. SQL Server Integration Services SSIS is also a great tool for connecting SQL Servers and diverse data systems together. SSIS is great when working with systems that are not SQL Server based. Which one is better? It depends on the need and the application.

Simple T-SQL Warehousing

Using SQL 2005 or later allows the using of the pivot command when querying data. Pivot Tables can simplify a lot of reporting and calculations (which take time). A very simple example of would be the following SQL Statement:

This is not the perfect example but should give you an idea of what you can do to manipulate the data to create a warehouse. You wouldn’t want to simply do an insert every time you run the process; you would want to do updates / inserts to get the best result. The data velocity (how fast the data changes) or the need of the data updating of the pivot table data can be changed would have an effect on the process itself.

SQL Server Integration Services

SSIS is much more than Pivot (though it can pivot data easily) and is great for combining data from multiple system into one data warehouse. The catch with SSIS and SQL Server is the versions of Business Intelligence Development Studio BIDS must match the SQL Server the SSIS Package is running on. A SSIS Package for SQL Server 2005 must be created in BIDS 2005. SQL Server 2008 must be created in BIDS 2008 and so on.

The amount of tasks/data manipulated/script tasks you can do in SSIS is quite staggering. I only wanted to mention SSIS since in today’s data warehousing world it is one of the best tools on the market.

JavaScript is a powerful client side scripting language. It allows developers to quickly add/remove functionality. It can be dropped in or generated from code. In WEB 2.0, JavaScript is the backbone of creating rich user environments. It is quite the catch 22. Oh how I love to hate and hate to love JavaScript.

JavaScript can pass some rudimentary tasks to the client so, as developers know, this can save processing cycles. Sometimes it can actually add processing cycles, so it definitely depends. Saving processing time allows application to run faster for the most part. You don’t have to wait for a complete page cycle to do tasks ala 1998. Basically, users are not patient nor should they be patient. They are used to the Desktop world. I feel JavaScript helps bridge that gap for users; sometime developers/designers go overboard.

Ease of Use

Love
Javascript is easy to use. Compatible with any web programming language: Classic ASP, .NET, PHP, Ruby, JSP. It integrates easily. It is fairly lightweight and the syntax is not mind-blowing.

Hate
It is a little to easy to use and users can directly access things in your page. It gives the user more control than what they know. Look you can easily change the background of any page in the address bar.

This only touches the surface of what JavaScript can do. It can get into your web app and change things around. I use it for quick fixes on the fly or to try different things. You can’t rely on JavaScript it will only cause you pain. Can you trust the DOM? No.

JavaScript is an interesting topic still it was once vogue, faded out, and then came back (with velocity). I think at one point in JavaScript’s history it was somewhat confused for Java, but I don’t think that is currently valid. There are so many great JavaScript libraries out there that enhance the UI and the total web experience.

They are even available from the Google API with no API Key which is an added bonus; unlimited connections to boot. I don’t think a lot of these effects/plug-ins would be as robust or available if not for JavaScript libraries and the good old Goog.

I really don’t hate JavaScript, but I think it can be overused or used incorrectly (say for validation). Sure it can help in notifying the end-user of validation issues; it should also be validated on the server side. Web development is a many layered burrito.